WordPress & SEO Terminology For Every Webmaster and Blogger Should Know and Understand

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WordPress & SEO Terminology For Every Webmaster and Blogger Should Know and Understand

WordPress Terminology For Every Webmaster and Blogger Should Know and Understand

As you are using WordPress for your content publishing , you might be get some terminology about WordPress and SEO. This article will provide brief explanations of some of the most commonly used terms, helping you understand about wordpress and seo terminology.

301 Redirect

A way to make one web page redirect the visitor to another page. Whenever you change the web address of a page, apply a 301 redirect to make the old address point to the new one. This ensures that people who have linked to or bookmarked the old address will automatically get to the new one, and search engines can update their index.

Domain

This is the name of your website, or what people type into the address bar when they want to find your site. For example, the domain for this site is youmegeek.com. The TLD (or top-level domain) for this site is .com, but you’ll see all sorts of TLDs around the web from .us to .co. Subdomains are one step below the base domain name for your site. So a subdomain for youmegeek.com would be blog.youmegeek.com.

Domain Registrar

This is where you purchase your domain name. A lot of web hosts act as domain registrars, but they can be different. In fact, it’s usually a good practice to register your domain with a registrar like GoDaddy, Hover, or Namecheap, and host your website somewhere else.

ALT Text/Tag or Attribute

A description of an image in your site’s HTML. Unlike humans, search engines read only the ALT text of images, not the images themselves. Add ALT text to images whenever possible.

Anchor Text

The actual text of a link to a web page. On most websites, this text is usually dark blue and underlined, or purple if you’ve visited the link in the past. Anchor text helps search engines understand what the destination page is about; it describes what you will see if you click through.

Web Host

This is the Hosting company that provides a service for storing files and applications for your website. You purchase your small piece of the web from your web hosting provider.

A web hosting account can actually be the home to lots of websites with different domain names. Web hosts generally setup and manage some basic software and web servers so that you can get a website online without too much inconvenience.

Web Server

A web server is the actual hardware that is owned by a hosting company. This is the physical location where your files are stored and served up for the world to see. These servers operate in very much the same way your home computer does, but use specialized hardware and software to share your content with the web in an efficient and speedy way.

CPU

A CPU is a Central Processing Unit. Basically what it does is carry out the work for your web server. Any instructions are sent through the CPU are then distributed to different areas of the computer. CPU usage is a common bottleneck in shared web servers or poorly configured servers. Usually if you don’t have enough CPU resources, you’ll know because your website will slowly crawl instead of running slow.

RAM

Another part of your web server is RAM or Random Access Memory. The amount of RAM your web server has can greatly impact your site performance. Caching is often RAM dependent so having more will definitely help WordPress run more smooth, especially if you have some level of caching implement. Most shared hosts will usually have between 512MB and 1GB of RAM available for your server, although that can vary based on usage of other sites on the server. Most web hosts won’t tell you how much memory they allocate on shared accounts, but it’s worth asking just in case they will tell you.

Disk Space

Storage space issues are less and less common all the time, but they’re still a consideration that should be made when choosing a host. If a host markets their storage as “unlimited,” read the fine print and find out what that really means. It never actually means unlimited. Also, for a lot of web applications, 10GB of storage may be way more than what’s needed, but if you run a tech blog , you’ll like want a host that offers 100GB of storage or more.

SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is for Secure Socket Layer transfers. It’s used primarily for passing sensitive data like credit cards, passwords, and electronic health information. If you’re ever submitting that type of information, make sure the website where you’re submitting the data has a green lock in the browser bar. If you ever want to open your own online store, you’ll need an SSL certificate.

eCommerce

An eCommerce website is site where things are purchased, like an online store. Amazon.com is a massive eCommerce site, but it’s entirely possible to have your own eCommerce website hosted right on your own blog or website.

HTML

HTML or HyperText Markup Language is what gives your website structure and is the language used to display pretty much all websites inside of a browser. It’s an incredibly common web language and probably the primary starting spot for anyone who wants to learn about design or building websites.

CSS

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets control the majority of the styles for every WordPress theme. With CSS you can easily edit a few lines of code and do things like change the font size throughout the site or add a new background pattern.

PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor (earlier called,Personal Home Page) PHP is an HTML-embedded, server-side scripting language designed for web development. PHP is the coding language used in WordPress. It’s a dynamic language that gives lots of flexibility for different types of functions. It does everything from powering your WordPress dashboard to the Twitter widget in your sidebar.

Caching

Caching is a technology that’s used to store certain pieces of your website in quickly accessible memory. By storing them there instead of on your hard drive, it improves the performance of your site but also cuts down on the resources needed by your server. Proper caching can potentially save you money on your web hosting but shouldn’t be used as a replacement for running your site on a quality host.

CMS

A CMS is a Content Management System, or a way to easily mange things that you create without writing thousands of static files from scratch. There are a lot of popular Content Management Systems, but WordPress is the best CMS among others.

Pingback

A pingback is essentially an alert that someone has linked to your site or your content. Pingbacks appear in the comments section of WordPress and often include the source of where the link came from.

XML-RPC

XML RPC is a protocol used for remote publishing. Essentially XML RPC allows you to do things like write your posts with Windows Live Writer and then push your content to your website remotely. It’s also what the WordPress mobile app (Android/iPhone) uses for publishing. It has a lot of other functionality too, but the main gist is that it lets you publish without using the web interface of WordPress.

RSS Feed

RSS or Rich Site Summary is a series of web feeds for content that updates frequently, like blog posts. WordPress has RSS feeds built-in for the full site, specific categories, or even specific authors. People can subscribe to the RSS feed for the site and get content, often formatted in simple HTML, delivered to their favorite RSS readers,

Permalink

A permalink is a permanent URL for a piece of content. For example, the URL that you use to view an old post on the New York Times is known as a permalink. WordPress provides pretty permalinks out of the box which will give your post URLs something like domain.com/this-post-is-awesome instead of domain.com/?p=2152. They’re easier for people to read and remember and also add search engine benefits as well.

Shortcode

A shortcode is a small code in brackets that represents a much larger function. It’s a nice way of consolidating certain functionality for users. Instead of including 1000 lines of PHP into a post or page, shortcodes allow us to do the same thing with a short word and perhaps a few parameters.

JetPack

JetPack is a WordPress plugin that adds all sorts of functionality to your WordPress site. It can do everything from adding caching to adding sharing buttons to your posts and pages. It does require a WordPress.com account to function, but once you set that up you can add a lot of different functionality to your site with that one plugin.

Akismet

Akismet a plugin that comes installed with WordPress core and does spam filtering for the comment form on your site. Once you get a key from Akismet, all comments are passed through their service and are marked as spam or not spam. Like any spam filtering service on the web, it isn’t perfect, but it does a really nice job for an out of the box solution.

Canonical URL

The canonical URL is the best address on which a user can find a piece of information. Sometimes you might have a situation where the same page content can be accessed at more than one address. Specifying the canonical URL helps search engines understand which address for a piece of content is the best one.

Headings

Text on your website that is placed inside of a heading tag, such as an H1 or H2 so on. This text is often presented in a larger and stronger font than other text on the page.

Inbound Link

A link from one site into another. A link from another site will improve your SEO, especially if that site has a high PageRank.

Internal Link

A link from one page to another on the same website, such as from your homepage to your products page.

Indexed Pages

The pages of your website that are stored by search engines.

Nofollow

When a link from one site does not pass SEO credit to another. Do not use nofollow when linking to internal pages in your website. Use it when linking to external pages that you don’t want to endorse.